It all started when CNN repoter Miles O'Brien announced that in Biloxi, Miss., 30 people had died in the St. Charles apartment complex. Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove immediately investigated, expecting a heavy workload. But he discovered that no one had died, and immediately announced the news to the media. This hardly stopped a news story that had already assumed a reality of its own.

Reports WLOX:

Biloxi's public affairs director has seen several versions of the story.

"And it was in a CNN story where we first saw it. Miles O'Brien was standing in front of the Beau Rivage doing a stand up," said City of Biloxi spokesman, Vincent Creel.

The CNN reporter told his audience that 30 people died in the St. Charles apartment complex on the beach in Biloxi.

Well, Republicans may have made a lot of mistakes in the last couple of years, but they're generally not stupid. I predicted months ago that Republicans would soon begin combing the far-left hate-blog Daily Kos as part of their opposition research for the upcoming elections. They would be idiots not to. Prominent Democrats from all over the country have openly aligned with Markos and his group of Blame America First defeatists. Voters have every right to know that information before they walk into the voting booth.

And so, I note, it has begun with the first in-depth look at what Markos and his sycophantic crew of crypto-nazis are really all about.

I notice there are a lot of blasts at whiny defeatist Ned "Hamsher and Markos's Lapdog" Lamont, too. Good. The Lamont Democrats have not yet gotten a tenth the kicking around they deserve. They are are vicious beyond belief. They need to be exposed to the world, for they've been given the role of "kingmakers" in today's Democratic Party. The Democratic Party therefore needs to either answer directly for that, or embrace it and explain why it's a good thing that hatemongering idiots like Markos and his hordes are the future of their party.

Because news and discussion don't know weekends. And since the ideology poll thread got full.

The front page of today's Chicago Tribune carries the headline: "Bush's vows after Katrina go unfulfilled, Critics: Washington `all windup, no pitch.'"

The principal critic cited is the dependably liberal historian Douglas Brinkley of Tulane University. "'The Bush administration, post-Katrina, has been all windup and no pitch. It's a low point in Bush's tenure,' says Brinkley."

The professor's credentials as an impartial observer are questionable. Here, after all, is a man who claims that Jimmy Carter "is seen as a national treasure - even by people who didn't like him as president." A man who asserted: "I think he'd (John Kerry) make a first-rate president." A man who wants to see Bill Clinton's reputation rehabilitated and says, "Hopefully, we'll have a fuller view and also understand that he's had a great many important strengths."

As bloggers continue to examine alleged instances of post-publication editing by Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell, they appear to have uncovered additional instances where Mitchell may have altered previosuly published work. Blogger Allah Pundit, posting at Hot Air felt that two paragraphs were added after publication to a recent Mitchell piece.

I will swear to you on a stack of Bibles that those two paragraphs weren’t there when the article first went online. I wrote a whole post about it; I read it through several times, specifically looking for instances of Mitchell taking disingenuous shots at bloggers. There were none. It was just a compendium of quotes from the Lightstalkers thread. Today, after reading CY’s post accusing him (or someone) of rewriting that old column, I checked the two about war photographers. And there were the paragraphs about Zombie that I don’t remember reading.

In the Saturday Washington Post, Rick Weiss skips over his own misreporting of embryonic stem-cell research by Robert Lanza and Advanced Cell Technology. The technique involves removing one cell from an early eight-celled embyro, cultivating the single cell into a new self-replicating line and, in theory, allowing the seven-celled embryo to survive and grow. But despite early reports, including Weiss's, all the embryos were destroyed. Weiss says Nature, which published the Lanza/ACT study, has now "corrected wording in a lay-language news release it had distributed in advance," but he doesn't acknowledge the errors in his own original account.

In today's Critic Alleges Deceit in Study On Stem Cells, Weiss quotes from an email by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Richard Doerflinger:

First, he said the scientists did not make it clear that no embryos survived their experiments. In fact, data in the paper do make that clear, but Nature's initial release said otherwise...

But Weiss didn't make it clear that no embryos survived--his story on Thursday said otherwise:

In this photograph, we're told that Iranian President Ahadmadinejad inists that, "Iran is no threat to Israel."

No threat to Israel? That's a relief. I could've sworn that the Prez didn't like those evil Zionists. In fact, I could've sworn he said,

[E]stablishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world hegemonic system and arrogant powers against the world of Islam... Ahmadinejad pointed to the meeting dubbed "A World Without Zionism" and criticized those sowing the seed of disappointment in materializing such a goal and attempting to undermine the world of Islam.

So, would a world without Zionism include Israel?

He added that a world without the US and Israel would be possible.

Ahh, I see. So in other words, Iran is a threat to Israel!

(As a side note, did'ya notice how respectful his photograph is?)

For years, enemies of mankind such as Steve Irwin and Jeff Corwin have duped the American people into believing we have nothing to fear from allowing megafauna to trundle unimpeded across the face of the continent.

On these propaganda pieces disguised as informative educational programming, we are told that alligators and black bears wouldn't harm a hair on a human head.

However, three deaths at the mouths of ravenous reptiles and the report of a child being mauled to death by a black bear makes you stop and wonder if the wrong people weren't eaten for the sake of the gene pool.

The next time citizens hear of pleas by environmentalists to reintroduce extinct species, they would do well to think back to the tragedy befalling these individuals and their families.

As Tom Johnson noted, Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon wrote a column for Thursday's paper, headlined "Gumbel Has the Right To Say What He Feels." After Gumbel insulted union leader Gene Upshaw about needing a "leash" because he was the NFL Commissioner's "pet," Wilbon said he disagreed with the argument that Upshaw made bad deals for football players, but suggested the idea of the NFL Network removing Bryant Gumbel from broadcasting their football games later this fall "not only won't fly but will look like the silliest Nixonian attempt at censorship." But don't give him a First Amendment Award. That's not the way Wilbon felt about Rush Limbaugh broadcasting football games. In May of 2000, when ABC was considering Limbaugh as the third man in the broadcast booth for "Monday Night Football," he declared Rush was a racist, and has no right to broadcast:

Update: Mitchell had acknowledged his age twice in the previous version of the article and also stated it was a summer internship. Those items are in paragraphs five and six and have not changed. What he did was move it into the lead. You can see that in the old and new versions.

Still, I felt bad about it for years and (obviously) have never forgotten it. On the other hand, I was, at the time, just 19, it was a summer internship, and I'd only been on the job about a month.

One of the many alarming things about the Jayson Blair scandal is that he never grew up, and no one at The New York Times ever seemed to notice. My ethical breach at 19 in Niagara Falls was bad enough. One expects a bit more from a 27-year-old with years of experience in New York.

Writer/author Christopher Hitchens on Friday night gave the finger to the Los Angeles studio audience of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. As he laid out the case for how it's Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who wants World War Three, not George W. Bush, Hitchens cited how Ahmadinejad “says the Messiah is about to come back.” Maher quipped: "So does George Bush, by the way.” That caused a loud eruption of audience applause and cheering, which led Maher to clarify: “That's not facetious.” The crowd continued to applaud as Hitchens remarked, about those in attendance who had earlier cheered and laughed as Maher called Bush an “idiot” repeatedly: "That's not facetious. Your audience, which will clap at apparently anything, is frivolous.” Loud oohs and groans emanated from the audience, prompting Hitchens to give them the finger as he castigated them, “Fuck you, fuck you,” while the groans continued. (Transcript follows)

Video clip (41 seconds, includes vulgarity): Real (1.2 MB) or Windows Media (1.4 MB), plus MP3 audio (250 KB)